DNA Study Links Shroud of Turin to India, but the Origin Claim Remains Speculative

A linen cloth 4.4 meters long and 1.1 meters wide, kept in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, has now been read again, this time through the DNA that settled on it. Gianni Barcaccia of the University of Padova in Italy led the reanalysis. He and his colleagues went back to material collected from the cloth in 1978, the same samples they used in 2015 when they first suggested the shroud might have originated in India.

What they found was crowded. The cloth had preserved a wide mix of medieval and modern DNA from plants, animals and people. The animal traces included domestic cats and dogs, and farm animals such as chickens, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs and horses. Wild deer and rabbits turned up, along with fish including grey mullet and Atlantic cod, plus other ray-finned species. Insects such as flies and aphids were present, and so were arachnids. Plant DNA included carrots, wheat species, peppers, tomatoes and potatoes. Some of these crops reached Europe only after explorers began traveling to Asia and the Americas.

The human DNA drew the most attention. The team identified genetic material from numerous individuals who had handled the shroud, including the team that worked on it in 1978. The researchers wrote that the cloth had touched multiple people, which challenges any attempt to identify the shroud's original DNA. Nearly 40 percent of the human DNA came from Indian lineages. Barcaccia and his colleagues suggested this might reflect historical interactions, or Romans importing linen from regions near the Indus valley. They wrote that the traces point to potentially extensive exposure of the cloth around the Mediterranean, and to the possibility that the yarn was produced in India. That is a possibility, not a finding of origin.

The object at the center of this is one of Christianity's best known and most disputed relics. It was first located in France in 1354 and has been in Turin since the 16th century. Many believe it is the linen used to wrap Jesus's body after the crucifixion. It bears a faint image of a bearded, long-haired, roughly middle-aged man with a moustache, seen from front and back, with the face and back of the head near the cloth's center. Reddish stains resemble blood and wounds, and the image shows swollen cheekbones and bruised, abraded shoulders. The relic became widely famous in 1898, when the Italian lawyer and photographer Secondo Pia photographed it and the figure appeared far clearer than it does to the naked eye.

The dating question remains unsettled. In 1988, radiocarbon and accelerator mass spectrometry testing placed the cloth's making between 1260 and 1390, which rules out Jesus as the man imprinted on it. Some Christian scholars still contest that result. Others point to earlier references. The Pray Codex, a Hungarian illuminated manuscript dated to about 1192 to 1195, shows Jesus's body at the anointing, and scholars note similarities such as thumbs hidden behind the palms. In 1203, the French crusader Robert de Clari recorded that a church in Constantinople, My Lady St. Mary of Blachernae, displayed every Friday a cloth believed to be Christ's burial shroud, with his figure visible.

The Gospels complicate the picture. John 19:40 describes the body wrapped in strips of linen, not a single cloth. Matthew and Mark mention no cloth at the empty tomb. Luke 24:12 and John 20:5 and 20:6 describe linen strips, and John 20:7 mentions a sudarium. A 2025 study in Textiles noted that none of the four Gospels mentions the burial shroud after the Resurrection, and the Acts of the Apostles is silent on any such cloth too.

For believers, the veneration continues regardless. The late Pope Francis prayed before the shroud during its most recent exposition in 2015. The new DNA work does not settle origin or authenticity. It shows how many hands, animals and crops have touched the cloth, which makes recovering any original genetic signal harder, while the 1988 dating stays contested by some scholars.